December 21st I gave birth to my fifth child. That was her original due date. I was induced between 8:30pm and 9:00pm on December 20th. My daughter, my husband, and my mother, were in the hospital room with me for the first few hours. I typically labor for about ten hours, so I assumed baby girl would be born around 6:30am and I braced myself for that. The day I was induced I had read an instagram post from a woman who was in labor for something in the realm of 36 hours. That fear was in the back of my mind. I knew I could handle ten hours, but could I handle multiple days of being in labor?

My daughter played cards with me for a while. I really wanted her there so that if she has children some day, she’ll have some idea what it’s like. I feel like I had no clue what to expect when I had my first. At 2:45am, my daughter said she was too tired to stay any longer, so my mother took her home. We live about 25 minutes from the hospital. After my daughter left, the nurse came in and I asked to use the bathroom. I had told the nurse I thought my water had broke, which it had. Typically, once my water breaks things progress quickly, but I wasn’t close to ten hours yet so I didn’t get my hopes up. I was not able to labor on the yoga ball thing because unless I was laying on the bed, they could not find the baby’s heartbeat with the monitor. It felt much better sitting on the toilet than it did laying in bed, so I stayed sitting on the toilet for several minutes. When I got back in the bed, I told the nurse I felt like it was getting close.

She checked my dilation and I was at 8 centimeters. She called the midwife and another older nurse came in to help prepare things. I believe I had been at 3 centimeters the last time they checked and they usually call the midwife at 5 centimeters. I had one contraction where I screamed “Fuuuuu—-dge.” The older nurse laughed and said I could say whatever I wanted because she had heard it all. The hospital I was at is a Catholic hospital, so there was a crucifix on the wall in the room. I looked at that and said a few Hail Marys to myself. That seemed to help. They didn’t want me to push until the midwife got there, so I tried to just breathe through the contractions. That worked for a few minutes, but then I just gave into the contractions and let my body start pushing. They tried to get the doctor who was on staff that night to come in, since it didn’t look like the midwife was going to make it. Apparently she was just across the hall from my room, but she was not able to get her gloves on and get in the room before I had pushed out baby girl. My husband texted his mother when I started pushing and literally one minute later texted that the baby was born. It felt like I pushed longer than one minute, but I sensed it was less than five minutes. I have been blessed that pushing was never an issue for me.

I was a little disappointed that my older daughter didn’t get to be there for the birth, but my husband said it may have been for the best. I did scream some, though I didn’t cry this time, and there was blood everywhere. I thought it looked like a crime scene with all the blood, but the nurse assured me it was less blood than they normally see. With the other kids, I always hit this point where I would be crying saying, “I can’t do this.” That was usually really close to me giving birth. This time I was able to stay relatively calm. I suspect the praying is what made a difference in that regard, or just mentally preparing myself that I have done this before and it is always the point I think I’m falling apart that it is really almost over.

Baby Girl was born at 3:21am. It was really only 5.5 hours of active labor, which isn’t bad at all. My mother came back after taking my daughter home. My mother-in-law stayed at our house to watch the other kids. When my mother got back she was surprised I had already given birth. My husband had let my daughter know it was close shortly after she left. My mother offered to turn around, but my daughter said she just wanted to go home and sleep. In her defense, the hospital chairs are not comfortable. I don’t think any of us realized how close I was, so my mother thought she would make it back before I gave birth.

We hadn’t completely decided on baby girl’s name until after she was born, but I knew I wanted her to have my father’s middle name. My father died a couple weeks before I got pregnant. My father was really into giving the “peace sign” with his fingers. We have lots of pictures of him doing that and my sons do that in pictures to “be like Grandpa.” When my mother got there, baby girl was making a “peace sign” with her fingers as she nursed. My mother and I thought that was a neat sign, or “God Wink,’” if you will.

I kept telling people it went as easy as could be expected, but I still felt like I had been run over by a truck. We were able to get out of the hospital 36 hours after she was born. She needed to eat every hour for the first week of her life. That was obviously really hard for me, as her food source. I was so exhausted for Christmas that I didn’t dwell too much on the fact that it was my first Christmas without my father. I cried a little bit on our way to my mother’s house after my five-year-old said he missed Grandpa. Other than that, it wasn’t that emotional of a day.

I thought Christmas would be really hard without my father, but it wasn’t as bad as I had expected. I think the excitement and exhaustion of a new baby was certainly a distraction. Three hundred sixty-four days after my father’s cancer diagnosis, I gave birth to baby girl.

I opted to not really take maternity leave, but rather just work part-time. I thought that would allow me more time. The newborn phase seems as though it was easier in my twenties than in my thirties, but maybe I just blocked out the memories of the suffering. It was pretty tough trying to work, mostly remotely, without sleeping much.

I had my first postpartum trial three weeks after giving birth. It was easy, but after the whole process I’m wondering if it would have been better to take the six weeks of not working, than to work part-time for twelve weeks. I’m lucky in that my firm doesn’t micromanage me or care all that much when I work, as long as things are getting done. My biggest issue with work, now that I am getting 6-7 hours of sleep most nights, is that pumping is causing my nipples to crack and bleed. I never experienced that with the other children. It was fine for a while, but got to the point I would literally cry when I pumped because it hurt so bad. I started to wonder if I was going to be able to keep nursing. The thought of not being able to made me really sad. Luckily, I’ve been able to power through, putting ointment on my nipples every time I feed or pump and using nipple shields when I nurse.

I’m pretty much back to work full-time now, which means pumping twice per day. It still hurts, but I am managing. Despite the nursing and sleeping struggles, we are all very happy to have the new addition to our family and watching the siblings bond is truly wonderful. Sometimes I have happy tears observing how much baby girl is loved by her siblings.